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Australia and Saudi Arabia work on grain crops

Australia will work with Saudi Arabia in trying to find more salt tolerant grain crops

Mark Noble: user submitted

Growing wheat and barley in the deserts of Saudi Arabia can be a challenge, so Saudi researchers are hoping to learn from Australia.

A deal has been done between the University of Adelaide and King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia to look at breeding salt-tolerant crops.

Stuart Roy, from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, says the deal should be good for Australian growers too.

"So they've got a range of field trials that are taking place out in desert regions, with and without irrigation, and so when those trials are assessing a large range of wheat and barley and quite a lot of those traits that they're looking at will be relevant to what we do in Australia, even though we're predominantly dryland agriculture."